It’s no secret that we love the Kindle. We’re carrying two of them on our travels, and they’re almost always in use. And while the battery life of a Kindle is quite impressive, it unfortunately does need to be charged on occasion.

That’s no problem when you have a charger. But, in the interest of saving space in our luggage, we decided to bring just one Kindle charger.

And then, we broke it.

So, here we are, in a small town in Patagonia, with another month of traveling ahead of us where we will only be venturing to even smaller and more remote towns in Patagonia, facing the prospect of watching our Kindles slowly fade to black, with no way to revive them until we return to Buenos Aires.

Unless we can find a replacement charger.

I began the search by sending an email to Amazon’s customer service with a plea for help. Amazon’s customer service is rightfully held in high regard, and I’ve always had good experiences with them, but in this case, they just fell down on the job. Their email reply was short and to the point; We can’t send a charger outside of the US. We can’t recommend any charger other than the two available in the the Kindle Accessories store, but one is out of stock, and we probably wouldn’t send the other overseas anyway.

But, the accessories store wasn’t a complete dead end. It contained a clue. The third-party Kindle charger they offered was the iGo charging system, which has a “power tip” that works for the Kindle. And, from reading the iGo Web site, I learned that that very same power tip is also compatible with a long list of cellphones.

Which meant that all I needed to do was find a charger for one of those cellphones and our Kindles would be back in business.

So, armed with the printout of compatible devices, we visited the cell phone shops of Bariloche and started rooting through their replacement chargers. Soon enough, we found the cargador viajero from Tecnocel. This quality piece of Chinese engineering has now recharged our Kindles successfully several times, and has thereby saved our vacation. Or, at least the parts with the really long bus rides.

Hopefully, any other Kindle users who are stranded outside of the US without a working charger will find this information useful. It sure would have been nice if Amazon’s customer service had spelled out this possibility in their original email response.

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on Sunday, January 11th, 2009 at 9:05 pm.
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No, the wireless features of the Kindle don’t work in Argentina. Instead, you have to download all Kindle purchases to your computer, then transfer the files from your computer to your Kindle via a USB cable. It’s not as convenient as Amazon’s “Whispernet” in the US, but it’s pretty easy to do…and it’s still way better than carrying around a stack of paperbacks on your travels!

Tom, did you see that current Kindle 1 owners get first dibs on the new Kindle 2? Place your order before midnight on February 10 and you’ll get the new Kindle 2 first. I’m still debating ordering one myself!

No, I had no idea that us Kindle 1 owners got preferential treatment. The Kindle 2 does look nicer (especially the faster screen refresh), but so far, I can’t see any compelling reason to spend $359 to upgrade. I still love Kindle 1!